The Office Fleet Is Fleeting, So Will Russians Go on Foot?

By FELICITY BARRINGER, Special to the New York Times

Published: February 4, 1988

MOSCOW, Feb. 3—
The office car, an omnipresent perquisite among the Soviet elite, is about to become a perk of the past for thousands of middle-level bureaucrats and factory executives.

In a move that contributes both to the sporadic official war on privilege and to the new push for economic accountability, the Soviet Government announced a decision today to make Government departments sell 40 percent of their automobile fleets by July 1.

These cars, often black Volga or Moskvich sedans with characteristic official license plates, are as integral to the Soviet urban landscape as birches are to the Russian forests - and just as symbolic. The official Volga has for years been associated with people who have privilege and power.

The decision could put hundreds of second-hand cars up for sale, possibly reducing the wait for ordinary citizens who have signed up to buy a car. Depending on where a Soviet worker is employed, he might have to wait from a month to years from the time he is able to pay for a car and the time a new car is available. Store Access Is Curtailed

The order for the reduction of vehicle fleets comes less than a week after the curtailing of another privilege, access to special stores for Russians who have earned foreign currency while abroad.

Long lines and shoving matches developed at these special stores last week with the announcement that the specially printed checks or coupons used there would be rescinded as of July 1 and that goods could be bought only by people with access to hard-currency bank accounts.

''I saw people at one store pushing and shoving so hard that the police eventually had to declare the store closed,'' a Western television producer said recently. ''The pushing was kind of good-natured but they really were pushing.''

A Soviet television announcer reported last week that ''regular storms of passions'' had been observed in front of the shops, demonstrations that were ''still going strong.''

''Tens of thousands of people who get their pay in ordinary rubles are surprised, to put it mildly, to see enormous lines near these prestigious shops,'' the announcer added. Black-Market Coupons

The coupons used at these stores have had considerable black market value because they offered access to goods virtually unobtainable in ordinary stores. The television announcer quoted a woman as saying: ''Eighty percent of those standing in this line are not entitled to this money. They are not the ones who have earned it.''

At a news conference in Stockholm today, a leading Soviet economist, Abel G. Aganbegyan said that moves are also under way to eliminate some medical privileges and recreational sites reserved for the elite.

Government agencies will have another incentive to cut the use of official vehicles and drivers because the cars will no longer be sold to employees at cost but at the far higher retail rate.

For factories and industrial enterprises, many of which are coping with new requirements for self-sufficiency, the cost of new automobiles, maintenance and fuel will come out of the enterprise's profits. Among the competing demands on that fund are housing, kindergartens and recreation.